


A Chance Meeting

by sandarenu



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Culture, almost a coffee shop au, as in Hailey Hotchner's death, mention of George Foyet, mentions of serial killers, murders mentioned in the background, trigger warnings for:, you know how criminal minds is all the tw tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-02-21
Packaged: 2018-01-13 06:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1215463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandarenu/pseuds/sandarenu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hotch and Elle run into each other in Brooklyn, years later. Sort of a fix-it fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Chance Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> Note: I was rewatching Elle's episodes and felt infinitely sad about her and her dynamic with Hotch so i wrote this. Hope someone enjoys it! Not betaed.

It’s the weekend of Jack’s birthday and Hotch is a few states away from home on a case that is as horrific as it is unsolvable. The unfamiliar sights and smells of nighttime Brooklyn surround him.

He’s been in the same suit for twenty-four hours when he walks into the hipstery coffee shop a few streets down. The BAU team has too many boxes of files to go through tonight, and Hotch finds he needs some air away from the boards pinned completely with photos of dead bodies. He’s volunteered to grab everyone coffee, Garcia’s fifty-word order included.

 

Fifteen minutes later, he’s trying to balance six coffee orders and not scratch an imaginary itch off the healed stab wounds on his chest when he sees her, seated by herself on a wooden crate and drinking some milky concoction out of a jar of jam.

Her hair is shorter, straighter, darker. She’s in a brown leather jacket and she turns, as if sensing his eyes on her, and gulps down a sip of her drink when she recognizes him.

“Elle?”

“Hotch.”

He almost pushes a Jesus-lookalike out of the way to walk to her table.

She’s looking down at her drink, outside at the street, anywhere but at him.

“It’s good to see you.” He says carefully.

“Right.” In her tone he can sense the anger she has towards him, even after all these years. Hotch is living life fresh after Foyet, and a wave of guilt hits him when he follows a train of thought he’d been unable to get rid of since he killed the Reaper, about how alike Elle and him had been in the end. Elle had killed with a bullet, Hotch had used his bare hands. Only Hotch had never had to be on a case since then where he’d had to relive what Foyet did to him while he was being used as bait for the UnSub.

“Elle, I’m not just being polite.“ He seats himself opposite her on a crate that is shorter than hers, clumsily arranging his large limbs. When he’s seated, Elle towers over him by a few inches; “It really is good to see you.”

Her eyes are piercing through him, and Hotch feels lost for words in a way that he has never experienced.

“What’s it been? Three years? I should’ve realized I’d run into you in Brooklyn one way or another”, he manages.

“You’re on a case? With the team?” she asks.

“Yes”, he says briefly.

She nods and goes back to sipping on her drink.

Hotch wants to get the words out before he loses his nerve.

“Elle, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Elle repeats.

“For what happened. That last case. With you. It was a bad call and we were wrong. We should’ve been there for you. I should’ve been there for you.”

She slams her drink down.

“You really wanna talk about this right now? Hotch, I was an FBI agent. I should’ve been able to handle it.”

He can’t make eye contact with her.

“You were an FBI agent who got shot in your own house. You were in recovery. It was a bad call, Elle, and I’m sorry.”

There’s something about Elle’s face that changes. She looks at him with something, maybe even gratitude, a small smile. She takes a shaky sip from her jam jar.

“I’m sorry I shot the guy, too. I was an idiot.”

He doesn’t want to prod. Doesn’t care if she’s saying she shot him in cold blood or in self-defense. It’s been years. _Let it go,_ a voice that sounds like a shrugging Jason Gideon says in his head. _We all make mistakes. It’s what makes us human._

“I understand why you did.”

“No Hotch, look-“

“Elle, no. I- “ he’s debating for a second whether he wants to tell her the entire debacle, about Foyet, him killing Hailey, the way he’d been in Hotch’s apartment waiting for him just so he could stab him almost to death. How he’d broken into Hailey’s house, been near his son. He hasn’t seen Elle in years, he tries to tell himself. She’s not a close friend like they used to be. He betrayed her. She betrayed the team. Betrayed her principles.

He doesn’t believe in fate, but it feels significant that her and Elle happened to be in this dingy café at the same time.

“I understand what you did because I – I killed him too. With my bare hands, actually.”

Maybe Hotch needed a sign she was still the same Elle, still so empathetic and feeling, and the concern on her face shows exactly that.

“Hotch, what happened?”

One look at her wide eyes and he’s spilling the whole thing like a sinner at a confession booth.

When he’s done telling her, Elle has a hand laced in his own. His fingers are longer and his hands wider, but there’s a strength to her grip that he doesn’t feel the need to match at this moment, and with that simple gesture she’s supporting him in a way nobody close to him has for a while.

“I’m so sorry”, she says finally. They look at each other at the same beat, and Hotch awkwardly withdraws his hand. “How are you even coping?”

“I don’t”, he admits.

“Hotch.”

“I have to. For Jack.”

“I feel like an ass for being angry at you all these years”, she admits.

“You had every right.”

“Maybe, but in the end you were just doing your job. You went through something horrific and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you as your friend. ”

“I’m sorry too. Maybe you weren’t up for the job anymore, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t my friend. I should’ve been there for you more. I see that now.”

They smile at each other a bit sadly.

“I’m glad you’re here”, she says. “I missed you.”

He finds himself smiling unguardedly, any memories from his childhood, from his training, telling him he needs to suppress it, _don’t be a pussy boy, be a man_ , all gone because she’s here, after so long. Remembers how she said she’d wondered why he never smiled.

“I missed you too”, he admits.

 

Elle finishes her drink, and it seems natural to follow her outside into the street. The chilly air dissipates the seriousness of the conversation they’d just had, and they find themselves subconsciously slipping back into their old rapport and banter. He tells her about Jack and soccer practice and how he’s training for a triathlon. “Well, you are a bit skinnier”, she teases. He’s happy, he realizes. His chest feels different.

“My car’s parked near here”, she tells him. They walk together along the pavement, coat-clad elbows brushing periodically. The six cups of coffee are cooling in the tray, and he doesn’t really care. Elle isn’t angry with him. He isn’t angry with her. They’d met by chance (although maybe this was inevitable, because he thinks about her every time he passes through Brooklyn, they all do) and the shitty day he’d had has turned into the best he’s had in a year. Elle is back in his life. He was so angry for a long time, couldn’t believe she’s defied his orders and just left the team, left him, but she’s here now. He can feel the warmth of her through his coat sleeve, alive and well and looking as beautiful as ever.

He and Elle are okay.

“You work nearby?” he asks. He’s vehemently avoided asking Garcia to track her down all these years, so he genuinely doesn’t know.

“I work in Manhattan. At the white collar crimes division.”

“I’m glad”, he tells her, and means it. He realizes on paper that her resignation doesn’t look as messy as it did in person. He’s glad.

“I had a date today, at a restaurant nearby, which is why I’m here”, she admits.

“Oh?” he can’t help smirking.

“Don’t look at me like that, mister. It was a bust. Guy was some uptight wallstreet crony with a stick up his ass.”

Hotch lets out a scoff of laughter at that, and Elle’s face morphs into a shadow of one her old grins, cheeky and playful.

“You following me back to my car?” she asks him, walking a few steps ahead of him and turning back to face him as she keeps walking backwards.

“You want me to leave?”

“I can tell you’re on a case, Hotch. Won’t the team want you back?”

He checks his watch. 10:16, it’s been half an hour since he left with the promise of coffee.

“It’s a horrific case”, he says, walking faster to catch up to her. “It’s not getting solved by tonight, that’s for sure. They can handle a few more minutes without me”, he shrugs, but fires off a quick text to JJ, tells her he ran into an old friend and would be back before eleven o’clock.

JJ calls him immediately, which he should’ve guessed. They’re all used to being paranoid about each other.

“I’m okay, JJ. Keep digging, I’ll be back soon”, he tells her, and hangs up.

“They need you there”, Elle tells him, stopping by a white hybrid parked alongside the road and pressing a button to open it.

“Elle, I haven’t seen you in years. They can handle half an hour without me.”

“I’ll give you a ride to the Brooklyn police station, come on” she says, gesturing at the passenger’s seat.

“Elle-“

“Hotch, come on.”

“Please don’t disappear again.” It sounds a bit more desperate than he meant it to sound.

She digs a business card and hands it to him wordlessly.

He’s seated and buckled when she starts the engine, and he smiles as he reads the card she gave him.

“How did you get into white collar crime?”

“I spent a year pissed off at you,” she replied, her eyes on the road seamlessly navigating the New York traffic, “then realized I’d go crazy if I didn’t do something. Thought I’d try going back to being a New York City cop, you know. Then a friend I’d known from those days rang me up and told me there was an opening at White Collar, and she told me my time at the BAU would put me at an advantage if I wanted to apply for it. I did.”

“I almost transferred to the white collar division of the FBI”, he says, and that brings back a stab of memories about Hailey, and he has to look down.

She seems to know what he’s thinking of and keeps talking so he doesn’t have to.

“It’s 9 to 5. You see fewer bodies. I think you’d be bored out of your mind, to be honest. But it suits me. I’ve realized I’m not the kind of person who can immerse myself in a job like this, you know. Not the way you can, Hotch. And that’s okay. I like having a job that ends at 5 everyday. I like being able to visit my grandma and my nieces. I like having weekends off. I’m where I need to be.”

“You look like it”, he says. There’s a peace in Elle’s voice that he’s never heard before. “Does your previous expertise in sex crimes ever help you?”

She chuckles.

“Strangely, yeah. You’d be surprised to hear how much conning money and sex crimes go together.”

“I’m not sure anything can surprise me anymore”, he says, just as Elle halts at the entrance to the police station.

“There you go”, she tells him, pointing at the sign up front.

He pauses. “You don’t really wanna come say hi to the team, do you?”

She turns towards him.

“Nah. Hotch I- I’m really not ready for that.”

“I understand”, he says, and he means it. He understands wanting to avoid pitying looks and wanting to avoid the past. He understands wanting to start a new life. Remembers how she never told them goodbye. “I know they all miss you, though.”

Elle’s smile looks a bit wobbly at that. “Maybe next time.”

He nods.

“Keep in touch, okay?” she asks.

“Elle, you know I will.”

She almost says something else, but before Hotch can turn the door handle, put his mask back on to face his team, she’s leaning over the gearstick to hug him.

He doesn’t realize he’s closed his eyes until he’s done it, hooking her chin against her shoulder, a hand somehow in her hair and the other bunching up the leather of her coat.

They were colleagues for years in the FBI, Hotch thinks, just over one of those together at the BAU. They’ve drunk from the same water bottle during stakeouts and shared shitty McDonalds burgers. Spent hours pressed against each other in narrow airplane seats, heads bent over gruesome photos. He remembers the lingering scent of gun oil and jasmine the day she gave him his coat back after he draped it around her in Jamaica. She’s wiped blood off his face and he’s washed blood off her walls. They’ve moved together through creepy houses and hallways, a team, so intimate and so in-sync that he remembers her once grabbing a gun off his waist to shoot an UnSub about to aim a bullet at him. Remembers clinging to her as a bomb went off and shrapnel flew around them.

He remembers her up close, in his face, angry and panicking and her PTSD triggered, accusing him of abandoning her.

And despite all that, this is the first time they’re really hugging.

He remembers whispering ‘I’ll miss you too’ into his desk and his files, because he’s not like Elle, not a person who carries their empathy and anger on their sleeve. Someone who sees their face reflected back in the photos of the victims. Like Elle, Like Hailey. He’s not a woman living in a culture of rape and violence, like she was, is. He’s the man with the gun who never smiles, is distant from the emotions of it all. Or was, anyway. And maybe knowing what that feels like is what he was missing when Elle left. He knows now. He can’t unlearn what he knows, and the price he paid for it. He can’t unlearn how it’s still with him, a year later, when Foyet has been dead for as long. Hyper vigilant, he’d labeled her and accused her. How little he’d known then.

He breathes in something that smells like chai, what she drank at the café, he thinks, just as she pulls back from him with a half-smile on her face. Ghosts a long finger down his cheek.

He finds the smile duplicated on his face, his eyebrows less severe and the line of his mouth less thin as he steps out, the cold coffee in hand.

“Bye, Hotch”, she says.

“See you soon.”

 

 

He waves as the car speeds away and fingers the business card inside his suit pocket, the stupid smile on his face refusing to go away.

 

“Well you look happy. Ran into someone good, huh?” Morgan asks him with a teasing wiggle of his eyebrows.

“I ran into an old friend. Sorry I was late”, Hotch tells him as neutrally as he can.

“Got her number?” Morgan jokes, and everyone laughs. 

Hotch doesn’t even have to lie. He knows they probably think about Elle on some level any time they’re in New York, but it’s awkward and messy and none of them said goodbye to her. And Hotch has never discussed it, so nobody brings it up. And it’s been years. Time heals all wounds and all that.

“Man, it’s fine. I’m glad you’re getting a little socializing. We’re not getting anywhere on this case”, Morgan says, throwing down another pile of paper on the desk.

 “This coffee is cold. My lovely pumpkin spice latte is ruined. Sir.” Garcia tells him, and storms off to find mugs and a microwave. Reid doesn’t care that it’s cold, only that it is at least 25% sugar.

Later, when his head is aching from having looked at the same gruesome collage for hours and his guilt over not being with his son on his birthday, Reid sneaks up to him to ask, “It was Elle, wasn’t it?” 

Hotch knows this team better than to lie. The half smile he couldn’t hide comes back on when he says softly, “Yeah. Believe it or not. It was Elle.” He scoffs. Can’t help how his smile widens into a grin. “I ran into her at a coffee shop, of all places.”

 “And you made amends?” asks Dr Reid, blocking his view of the crime scene photos.

“Yeah”, he says, and means it.

Reid looks happy to hear that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
